Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks spoke with political psychologist, Dr. Karin Tamerius, on her "Just the Facts" podcast on Tuesday, and the discussion walked through how one woman broke through far-right propaganda to have a conversation with a MAGA loyalist.
"So, I reached out to my angry uncle. Someone who listened to Rush Limbaugh, watched Fox News. Who was kind of living in a parallel universe from mine," said Dr. Tamerius.
"And we started talking, and I'll tell you in the beginning it was incredibly difficult ... I realized very quickly that if I wanted that conversation to go anywhere, I needed to listen. And by the time — so we had spent a few months conversing — I started to realize, you know, this is actually working," she continued.
Wine-Banks said that she and one of her pro-Trump friends debate frequently, but it became clear that her friend didn't even agree on the facts. Tamerius explained that there are steps to follow before addressing the facts.
"If you don't have somebody's trust, they aren't going to listen to you when you start presenting facts," the psychiatrist said. "And the key thing to understand is when we present facts, the reason we think they should be affected is that we think we're presenting them to an impartial judge. That we're presenting them to someone in a courtroom. But when we're talking to someone in a political conversation, they are already coming in with a bias. Very, very strong opinions."
She explained that humans are both conditioned and constructed to not be easily persuaded because it doesn't exactly help people adapt and evolve when they change their opinions willy-nilly.
"We need our beliefs to be fairly constant in order to function in the world," said Tamerius.
She cited a metaphor from Jonathan Haidt, an NYU social psychologist and author, who explained the mind as divided into parts, likening it to a person riding an elephant. There's the elephant, the rider and the path. The parts of our brains involve the rational and the emotional. The rider may have their own rational idea about where to go, but the elephant has its own ideas about where to go. The man might try to drag the elephant, but if they disagree, the elephant is more likely to win out.
"People don't want to be told what to think. People don't want to be judged. So, you want to go into a conversation first by letting people know, I'm not going to think any worse of you because you see things differently," Tamerius said. "I also don't think you're stupid."
Wine-Banks confessed she was still at a loss trying to figure out how to begin. So, Tamerius gave her a kind of opener.
Her specific situation is to approach someone by saying something to the effect of, "I notice you watch a lot of Fox News. That's really different from me. I tend to watch CNN. And I think you and I probably have some different ideas about politics, and my guess is that sometimes in the past, you may have felt really judged or even felt judged by other people. What I want you to know is I would love to talk about this in a way that is respectful to both of us. I want to learn where you're coming from. But I don't want to tell you what to believe."
Reporter Susan Berger used an anti-vaccine conversation as an example, but even her suggestion was "too confrontational," said Tamerius. The word that often puts people on guard is when you say "but."
"So you started with a briding statement, but you immediately undid it," she explained.
What she suggested folks do is to use something more like "yes, and" instead.